Nice post Manny. We've known for a long time that the word 'commitment' has degenerated into "please hold a place for me at your school so I don't get left out in the cold on signing day." That is all the coaches take it for, which is why they recruit potential replacements even after a 'commitment' is given. This door swings both ways, by the way, as coaches constantly give too many scholarships and end up pulling them from a recruit late in the game.
It's only the general public that is behind here, misled by the word commitment. We're the ones that treat a commitment as a blood oath to a school, and we're the ones who get pissed when they back out. The Letter of Intent is the blood oath...a 'commitment' is nothing more than a plane ticket...save a seat for me in case I decide to show up. I think we'd all be a lot less irritable if we caught up with the times and learn the new vocabulary, like the players and the coaches have managed to do. In every other walk of life a commitment is your word...in recruiting it's a placeholder.

Wednesday afternoon, instead of being out at the University of Miami for the second practice of the spring, I was inside The Miami Herald filming our newest installment of The Recruiting Report (a new webcast set to be released in two weeks). During our show, I got a chance to sit down and talk ...